Essential Texts in Transnational Theory

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Author Bio

Lydia H. Liu is the Wun Tsun Tam Professor in the Humanities at Columbia University and Co-Director of the Center for Translingual and Transcultural Studies at Tsinghua University in Beijing. She is also the author of The Freudian Robot: Digital Media and the Future of the Unconscious (University of Chicago Press, 2011).

Dorothy Y. Ko is Professor of History and Women’s Studies at the Barnard College of Columbia University. She is a historian of early modern China, known for her multi-disciplinary and multi-dimensional research. She is also the author of Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (University of California Press, 2005).

He-Yin Zhen (ca. 1884-ca.1920) was a theorist who figured centrally in the birth of Chinese feminism. Unlike her contemporaries, she was concerned less with China’s fate as a nation and more with the relationship among patriarchy, imperialism, capitalism, and gender subjugation as global historical problems. This volume, the first translation and study of He-Yin’s work in English, critically reconstructs early twentieth-century Chinese feminist thought in a transnational context by juxtaposing He-Yin Zhen’s writing against works by two better-known male interlocutors of her time.

The editors begin with a detailed analysis of He-Yin Zhen’s life and thought. They then present annotated translations of six of her major essays, as well as two foundational tracts by her male contemporaries, Jin Tianhe (1874-1947) and Liang Qichao (1873–1929), to which He-Yin’s work responds and with which it engages. Jin, a poet and educator, and Liang, a philosopher and journalist, understood feminism as a paternalistic cause that liberals like themselves should defend. He-Yin presents an alternative conception that draws upon anarchism and other radical trends. Ahead of her time, He-Yin Zhen complicates conventional accounts of feminism and China’s history, offering original perspectives on sex, gender, labor, and power that remain relevant today. —Columbia University Press